How Luxury Houses are Rewriting the Language of Art Fairs
This week, Regent’s Park turns into something else. The white tents of Frieze rise again, and London shifts into a different rhythm. For a few days, the park becomes a secret city where galleries from all over the world show off their work. Collectors, curators, students, and wanderers move through booths where paintings hang and sculptures stand. The whole place feels charged with possibility.
But Frieze and other fairs are no longer just about the galleries and the art. Walk the fair and you notice another presence. Spaces are created not only by artists or dealers but by luxury houses that can now speak the language of culture as confidently as they speak the language of their products.
It wasn’t always like this. For a long time, luxury brands stayed in the background, pouring champagne in VIP lounges or handing out discreet tote bags. Their presence was polite and secondary. Now they step in as cultural players. Their spaces are about experience and atmosphere, and works that stay in memory as much as anything the galleries present.
Tales & Tellers. Photo Courtesy: Miu Miu.
Frieze London 2025 arrives with a new layout by A Studio Between and an entrance by Portas Vilaseca, The Pit, and Soft Opening that reshapes how visitors move through the space. The fair feels more like a living city than a hall. It is built through moods rather than walls. Within it, luxury houses create small worlds of ritual, play, and reflection that complement the art rather than compete with it.
Meanwhile, Art Basel Paris spills beyond the Grand Palais, stretching from Avenue Winston Churchill to Place Vendôme. Paris becomes part of the exhibition, an open-air stage where art and luxury meet.
This widening of the stage changes everything. Fairs are no longer only about what hangs on the walls. They have become ecosystems of collaboration, where brands, artists, and audiences shape the atmosphere together.
Art and luxury no longer meet by chance. They move together and give each other something essential. For the brands, art brings meaning. For the fairs, luxury brings rhythm and visibility. And for visitors, the result sits in between, not just an art fair or a showcase, but a playground where stories are written in champagne bubbles, layers of light, and quiet dialogues of culture.
Ruinart has led this shift. The world’s oldest champagne house now treats the fair as a stage for ideas. Each year, through its Carte Blanche program, Ruinart invites artists to interpret its history, materials, and connection to nature.
From 2020 to 2021, David Shrigley was Ruinart’s Carte Blanche artist. Unconventional Bubbles appeared in the Ruinart Art Bar at Frieze London 2021 and later at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021.
David Shrigley as Ruinart’s Carte Blanche artist. Photo Courtesy: Frieze.
At Frieze London 2023, Eva Jospin showed Promenade(s) with Ruinart, an immersive cardboard landscape tied to the Maison’s heritage.
Ruinart and Eva Jospin at Frieze London 2023. Image courtesy: design antho/ogy UK.
If Ruinart brings energy, La Prairie brings calm. The Swiss skincare house approaches Frieze as a meditation. Its collaborations, such as the one with artist Carla Chan, explore time, transformation, and the poetry of slowness.
Space Between The Light Glows, at Frieze New York 2021. Photo Courtesy: Frieze.
Space Between The Light Glows, at Frieze New York 2021. Photo Courtesy: Frieze.
Inside their space, everything softens: the light, the tone, even people’s pace. It feels like a pause in the middle of the fair’s energy. La Prairie turns skincare into a ritual, an act of reflection rather than beauty. The brand’s presence never shouts; it stays quietly in people’s minds, showing that luxury can be intimate instead of loud.
Across the Channel, Art Basel Paris is finding its own rhythm. Inside the Grand Palais Éphémère, Miu Miu has become one of the fair’s most intriguing presences. As Official Partner of the Public Program, the house continues to expand its storytelling universe.
In 2024, Tales & Tellers reimagined Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales film series through live performance and conversation, blending cinema, memory, and dialogue.
Tales & Tellers. Photo Courtesy: Miu Miu.
This year, Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten will present 30 Blizzards, a new commission that plays with sculpture and narrative, continuing Miu Miu’s fascination with language, femininity, and perception.
30 Blizzards. Photo Courtesy: Miu Miu.
If La Prairie invites stillness and Ruinart creates celebration, Miu Miu brings conversation. It moves between art and fashion, performance and cinema, where storytelling itself becomes a form of luxury.
As the lights fade and the tents come down, what stays is not only the art on the walls but the worlds built around it. Art and luxury now move through the same space, shaping experiences that live beyond objects, in emotion and memory. Frieze and Art Basel no longer separate culture from commerce; they turn both into something shared, something felt. In the end, these fairs become what their visitors make of them.
Michele Saad
Luxury Edit Co-Editor, MADE IN BED